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Artifact-level items should be granted by DM fiat, period. The rest need to be sprinklable in a campaign via more fiat, or some random placement so long as the DM can "tune" the ability. Like for example, the ring of feather fall that's wonky and on the fritz, about to burn out. Does the PC throw it away? Nah, but you wouldn't jump down too often, just in case it fails.

Here is where attunement can improve the situation. At 1st level you can wear the invisibility ring willy nilly, but when the Dark Lord is gathering his forces, putting it on draws his gaze to you, and his ringwraiths can see you clear as day even with it on. This is the type of negative attunement it should give. Super power but it's an evil item, and using it more and more will corrupt you. Or if the item is good, you still need to have a supreme will to control it, otherwise it will overwhelm you. So you can be invis'd for 10 rounds at a time if you just found it, or 1 hour at a time later, or even all day if you become Gollum-like in your slavish devotion to it. Just like the berserker's weapon that gives the fighter a need to kill his teammates if he can't quench its thirst for blood with more fodder.

I loved the description of the rings of wizardry. Those are definitely, to my mind, evil items, and wearing them over time would run the risk of the slain wizards' souls trying to take you over, or at least drive you insane and scitzo. Attunement can be a negative thing too. All magic should have a price.

Which is maybe why those plain vanilla +1 weapons are still sought out for : no negatives!!

Interestingly the level of the adventurer has zero correlation to the power of the items he finds. Level 1 adventurers are just as likely to find a Holy Avenger at the bottom of the goblin hole as world shattering badasses are to find one at the depths of Orcus's palace.

What I find even more bizarre is that, while a level 1 character might find a Holy Avenger at the bottom of a goblin hole, a level 5 character never will (because "easy" encounters never yield "legendary" items, whereas the same encounter for lower level characters would be "tough", which can yield "legendary" items).

Granted, but the fact that it wouldn't work in your particular campaign doesn't make them inherently bad.

I can see these random tables are rubbing a lot of people the wrong way, namely the ability for first-level characters to randomly receive an artifact. What alternatives do people propose, if we work under the assumptions that:

Item rarity stays intact.

We want to be able to randomly create items, so some form of tables will stay in.

The primary alternative I propose is that we abandon assumption (1), because I think it's a bad assumption (that, incidentally, does not even have any real weight of "tradition" to support it).

Other than that, I think we're lumbered.

Well ok, we can do away with these assumptions, but then what do you propose to counteract the consequences? If you do away with item rarity and don't patch the game-functional hole it leaves, then characters are just as likely to find a Vorpal sword as a generic +1. Are you proposing moving to an item level system, like 4e had? Categorize the items for random distribution some other way? Also do away with assumption 2 so that DMs are left to their own devices to distribute loot, regardless of DM experience? Do away with assumption 2 but categorize items so that even inexperienced DMs can reward magic items while being cognizant of their relative power levels (like 4e)? Or are you fine with the Random Number God distributing Vorpal and +1 swords equally?

Look, maybe I'm off-base with the assumptions I laid out; maybe I'm misinterpreting the 5e system as I've read it. But it seems that my first assumption is a core component of the new rules governing the distribution of magic items, and to do away with it would severely upset the direction this edition is headed. If you're going to mess with such assumptions in this hypothetical forum space, then it's only reasonable to fill that core with new assumptions.

1) Magic items should be items that player characters can make. It might be difficult, require quests or whatever, but there should be some possible "game" or space for character customisation that assumes player choice (within a resource framework) over the items their character has. Such items will, logically, be governed by some kind of market in the game world. These items should be graded by the character level at which their production should be feasible. This will translate into the size/xp value of encounter/dungeon that would be appropriate in order for them to be a reasonable "prize".

2) The 4E split of "Artifacts" into items of any "level" that exist purely for GM/"story"/world setting reasons was, to my mind, genius. This establishes a class of item that cannot be made by any in the game world - not even NPCs (except, perhaps, gods). These items have a completely different function from the "normal" magic items described above. They are the GM's "toys" to distribute, manipulate and take away at whim. They are really not part of any character - they are part of the world/story itself.

Keeping that split - and cleaning it up/clarifying it for the altered DDN design aims (which I think still haven't been properly or clearly enunciated - "please everyone" is not a design brief) - is where I really want to see magic items go.